HIS ANGEL WAS TAKEN, BUT HIS TRIED FAITH AND OBLIGATION PERSISTS

As a man of the cloth, George West always taught the lessons of tolerance,
compassion and peace.

But how was he to practice them when heroin stole his daughter's soul? When
his hands clutched the neck of her pusher? When he stumbled past the police
tape to identify the body of his youngest child?

"They took this little girl of mine and prostituted her to pay for the
drugs," he said of his bright but bafflingly insecure daughter.

Kathryn West graduated early from Albuquerque High and, at just 16, aimed
for college. One summer night in 1988, she picked up a group of female
hitchhikers. She never really came home again.

Her father had taught her to reach out to those who needed help - be they
elderly, homeless or standing with a thumb out.

As the minister of St. Timothy's Lutheran Church in the Highland area, he
had pioneered a social-justice agenda. It included a day care program for
the elderly, Bible studies in nursing homes, and food, shelter and company
to homeless people.

A one-time civil-rights activist and Vietnam War protester, West defines
himself as "a liberal-Democrat-progressive-whatever" and illustrates most
of his political beliefs with biblical parables.

But when Kathryn fell in with those who knew not of church pews and
sacraments, he turned from preaching to avenging.

Three times, he and his wife took her from the gang that had introduced her
to heroin. Three times, they checked her into psychiatric clinics. Three
times, she walked away and back to her fellow addicts.

Her college career withered. Her future fractured. Then, one night during
Lent, her father says, she made a brave decision.

She told her neighbors in a Southeast Heights apartment that she was
leaving the gang. The next morning, she was dead at 18.

A medical examiner cited the cause of death as "two expertly administered
massive doses of heroin into one hole in her left arm."

Kathryn West was left-handed. Her right arm could not have wielded a
syringe with such accuracy, her father says. He believes she was murdered.

He also believes he knows the murderer: the addict whom he had once
confronted on an apartment balcony, his fingers around her neck; the one he
calls his daughter's keeper.

The thought that pried his hands loose then and still now was that all of
them were victims, addicts and loved ones alike. Victims of a vicious drug.
Victims of a failing drug war. Victims of a wealthy drug lord "who's still
sitting in a big house somewhere out there."

Upon confirming that the girl in the silent apartment had once belonged to
him, West drove home. A dead sparrow lay in his yard. He thought of Jesus'
words about sparrows in the Sermon on the Mount: "One of them shall not
fall on the ground without your Father."

He saw it as a sign of God's love for every creature, even a teen-age
heroin addict. He buried the bird in his flower bed, "the beginning," he
said, "of my closure."

In 1993, debilitated by a clinical depression, West took early retirement.
But he did not walk away from his beliefs.

Earlier this month, he joined a rally at the state Capitol where he
denounced the drug war as well as a prison system that he says has ceased
to be a "Department of Corrections."

"The prison system we have is a contradiction of all that I have been
taught," he said afterward. "The fact that people get into trouble doesn't
mean that we should give up on them."

At times, he admits to feeling less charitably toward his daughter's drug
lord. But, he said, "There's a Lord out there that I follow, and he makes
me change when I have these gut instincts."

If he could, West says, he would take the profits of the drug trade and
build a penitentiary for penance - a proper blend of punishment, remorse,
forgiveness and redemption.

He would do it in the name of the Father, for the love of his daughter and
by the grace of all who have sinned.